I’ll say this for Sanda. The deeper we wade into this pool, the stranger things get. New revelations are dropped in casual fashion which totally change the tenor of the story. It continues to be very interesting even as it gets stranger and stranger, which is a good sign for its staying power I suppose. That can be a bit of a risky approach long-term though, and sooner or later it’s going to have to either dial it back and try to succeed with a more sane approach or just try to continuously up the ante and hope it doesn’t just wind up exhausting the viewer.
Revelation #1 occurs to Yagiuda and Sanda more or less at the same time. If Sanda falls in love with a child, it seems, he goes into cardiopulmonary arrest – or so Yagiuda believes anyway. It’s framed differently for Sanda but the gist of it is he believes Santa isn’t allowed to have a sex drive, period. Which is obviously a problem if he spends most of his time as a 14 year-old male, though things will prove to be far from simple. The implication here is that Sanda believes himself to be in-love with Fuyumura, which causes him to lapse into self-loathing.
Scrambling the eggs even further is Kazao Niko, who we briefly met at the end of last week’s episode. She’s Sanda’s fiancee, because (another revelation) kids are assigned a partner and required to marry and have children. She calls Sanda “Kacchan” but generally speaking their relationship seems to be limited to her teasing (insert your own prefix here) him. Niko is a total loose cannon and a bit of a rebel, and a “passing” typhoon (in this setting typhoons stick around for a month) gives her a perfect chance to indulge her impulses.
Yagiuda joins the stasff as a P.E. teacher in the interest of taking out Santa. This meshes with the headmaster’s wishes as he wants Santa gone too. Sanda is understandably shocked, and transforms himself into Santa once the two of them are alone, intent on settling things via combat. But he turns back into a boy mid-punch – Yagiuda’s punch – which unsettles the latter. Killing Santa is one thing, but he protests that he has no interesting in taking out a child. In fact if he can’t prove Sanda is Santa he can’t claim his head and save his job, which makes the two of them unlikely allies for the moment (a development I foresaw might happen).
The biggest reveal of all, though, is that children – thanks to vaccines and nutrition – no longer need to sleep. In fact Ooshibu forbids the ones in his care from doing it, as it speeds the onset of puberty. And no student of his will go through puberty before graduating – which is why Ono-san wound up fleeing. This is preposterous of course, as all these attempts to snowglobe children are. Making everyone wear slacks (which I noted after Episode 3) won’t stop boys from being horny. Telling kids not to sleep won’t stop them going through puberty. In fact lying awake all night is a great way to go crazy fast.
Ono comes off as if she already has, in fact. She went full pubertal after falling asleep next to Fukumura and having an erotic dream, waking up stacked and hot for Fuyumura’s form. I do sort of feel sorry for her even after she pulls a knife on Fuyumura, as her wig-out was pretty understandable. And Fuyumura’s confusion over her tweener status – adult or child, male or female – is deserving of empathy too. That’s not the same as liking them, and I don’t. And I’m not sure about Niko either. But this twisted premise just gets more and more interesting, and the Sanda-Yagiuda thread has the potential to level things up even more.
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